Most of the power authoritarians acquire is given to them freely by people adapting to what they imagine the new regime wants before being compelled to. By anticipating repression and conforming early, individuals teach the regime what it can get away with, so the act of pre-emptive compliance is itself a transfer of power.
When Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, local Austrians began persecuting Jews, seizing property, and improvising humiliations before any order arrived from Berlin, and the scale of this unprompted violence helped convince the SS that more radical policies were feasible. The episode is cited as concrete evidence that populations can escalate persecution faster than regimes demand.
Institutions do not protect themselves automatically; they fall one at a time unless defended, and after each falls the next becomes easier to take. The prescribed move is to pick a specific institution (a court, a newspaper, a union) and actively take its side from the start rather than waiting for a general crisis.
Tyranny advances through debased language (repeated slogans, borrowed clichés) and through the retreat of people into private screens and online crowds, so resistance is reframed as concrete acts: using original words, reading long-form texts, and making eye contact and small talk to maintain the physical social fabric. Freedom becomes a matter of personal habits of speech and bodily presence, not only of votes.